Frankly no - I see that event as the watershed when the appengine community suddenly matured. Thousands of people who were using appengine as free hosting disappeared, leaving those who actually understand the value proposition appengine offers.
Appengine is NOT cheap hosting. It IS an massively-scalable, massively-redundant zero-admin development platform - and maybe I'm nuts but I expect to pay for that. I was glad Google set realistic prices and put appengine on a commercial footing, because I don't want it cancelled next time Google has a bad quarter.
Just to put this in perspective, we have four appengine apps that handle about half a million users between them. They generate a 6-figure annual revenue, and we pay Google around $50 a month. Yep, you read that right - $50. We've looked at AWS, but we'd pay a lot more - and that's without factoring in the cost of a good sysadmin to support it.
If you need a company website, appengine is probably not for you. If you're putting on a royal wedding and expect billions of hits for a short period, it's perfect. If you love tweaking your own firewall rules and tuning Postgresql for ultimate performance, you don't want appengine. If you're a development shop that wants a stable, scalable platform with the overhead of a sysadmin, welcome to your new home.
I think you mean 'without the overhead of a sysadmin'... but thank you, I've been looking for a curt explanation as to when App Engine is a good choice, and you've explained it better than I ever could.
Thanks for shedding some light on this. I've been wondering about what happened to those devs who complained when Google bumped up their appengine prices. The complaints lasted for a while but then they seemed to stop. Perhaps that supports your "maturation" observation.
Appengine is NOT cheap hosting. It IS an massively-scalable, massively-redundant zero-admin development platform - and maybe I'm nuts but I expect to pay for that. I was glad Google set realistic prices and put appengine on a commercial footing, because I don't want it cancelled next time Google has a bad quarter.
Just to put this in perspective, we have four appengine apps that handle about half a million users between them. They generate a 6-figure annual revenue, and we pay Google around $50 a month. Yep, you read that right - $50. We've looked at AWS, but we'd pay a lot more - and that's without factoring in the cost of a good sysadmin to support it.
If you need a company website, appengine is probably not for you. If you're putting on a royal wedding and expect billions of hits for a short period, it's perfect. If you love tweaking your own firewall rules and tuning Postgresql for ultimate performance, you don't want appengine. If you're a development shop that wants a stable, scalable platform with the overhead of a sysadmin, welcome to your new home.